


Wiedersehen mit dem Erlkönig

by calysto1395



Series: Paranormal Nein [3]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Fjord (Critical Role) - Freeform, M/M, Modern AU, Nott the Brave - Freeform, Paranormal AU, Supernatural Elements, Torture, Yasha (Critical Role) - Freeform, caleb's backstory, could be read as gen - Freeform, mixed with D&D Rules
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 10:56:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22571998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calysto1395/pseuds/calysto1395
Summary: It's about as bad as Caleb has been dreading.
Relationships: Mollymauk Tealeaf/Caleb Widogast
Series: Paranormal Nein [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1334686
Comments: 4
Kudos: 71





	Wiedersehen mit dem Erlkönig

The blond man is new. Caleb doesn’t recognize him, not that it would make much of a difference. The man is focused on tattooing intricate lines on Caleb’s bound arms, following instructions on a paper in front of him. The tattoo gun was bigger than those Caleb had seen before - Beau getting colors filled on a peacock feather between her shoulder blades, daring him to say anything - Jester with her tongue between her teeth, carefully putting a heart on Nott’s delicate finger, Orly watching her like a hawk. 

They must have modified it themselves, Caleb thinks. The ink must be magical, a regular device is probably unfit for the task. 

Panic is a distant memory in his mind and all he has left is detached curiosity. It’s been a long time since he’s felt like this. It’s not nice. 

Their technique has evolved. The patterns they etch are vaguely familiar, but more refined than what lies in scar tissue underneath. Evocation symbols, most of them. A few draconic elemental runes. Twisting and interconnecting in a way that would be fascinating if they weren’t using his skin as a canvas.

Ikithon finishes his other arm, the metal pliers making a sharp sound as he sets them down. The crystals feel like smoldering coals underneath his skin. Caleb wants to scream, to burst, to move. But he can’t. 

“Let me know when you’re done.” Ikithon says to the blonde, who nods, still in deep concentration. Based on how long the first arm had taken him, it will be a while. The needle is a dull inconvenience, comparatively. The droning of the tattoo gun would be almost soothing if he weren’t so numb. 

Long fingers burrow in his hair and they are tacky with blood.

“Let’s begin, shall we, Bren?” 

Caleb wouldn’t have answered even if he could. 

* * *

“Astrid! That’s one of Caleb’s friends.” Jester says, her excitement just shy of mania. She reaches for a dusty tape on the shelf. Molly looks back at the door they came in from, but nobody seems to have noticed the outburst since Nott isn’t even sending down a message to inquire. Everything is quiet. The way the dust has settled in this place makes him wonder if anyone has ever set foot in what lies beneath their treasured library. 

“You think this is like, a dating hotline video?” Jester says, a weak attempt at humor. Molly chuckles for her sake as well as his own. She pushes the tape into the VCR player and it veers to life impossibly loud in the small room. 

“Let’s find out, shall we?” He says, and presses play when she doesn’t move.

A scream. Distorted through the old recording and time, but distinctly not a scream of pleasure. The video feed cuts in, showing a room from a high angle, like the camera was looking in from a hole in the ceiling. One could almost mistake it for a hospital for all the equipment spread out on shining metal tables, if only it weren’t being used to cut open the young woman strapped to a gurney. 

It’s hard to tell with the grainy footage but her screams are choked full of tears. She muffles them herself, biting down on her tongue and Molly wouldn’t be surprised if she drew blood. The man with the scalpel stands to tower over her. 

“I told you to be quiet. I thought you could handle it. Are you making a fool out of me?” The man asks.

The girl takes a shaky breath. “No, Master Ikithon. I will be quiet. I’m sorry.” She can barely get the words out.

One agonizing moment of silence between them. Then the man named Ikithon gets back to work. 

“As I was saying. This is crystal number 4. Type E.” He narrates nonchalantly and holds up a low glowing crystal between a pair of tweezers to the camera. Then he presses the crystal into the cut on her arm. This time the girl doesn’t scream. 

Jester is the one to press pause. 

“Holy shit.” Is all Molly can say. He spares a look at Jester and she looks as shaken as he feels. Her finger is lingering on the button of the VHS player, shaking. 

“Is Caleb’s name on one of the tapes?” She asks even though they both know it’s not. It was the first thing they were looking for. Find me something useful, Beau had told them between gritted teeth, frustration showing in every fibre of her being. Molly loves her like a sister and would die for her, again and again. 

He turns to the shelf anyway. More tapes labeled Astrid with varying dates. One row full of Bren at similar dates, all of them over a decade old. Further down, Eodwulf. A row of Lisa, fewer tapes then any of the others and on the bottom a full row of Gustav, only a few years past. The name makes his heart stop but he knows his Gustav is safe and sound with the circus, far away from this mess. One of the dates is the first performance Molly had seen. It doesn’t bring as much ease as he needs. 

He turns to Jester, giving her a small smile. “No Caleb.” It’s enough. Any of these tapes should be enough for the Cobalt Soul to help them. He hopes. It has to be enough. 

Jester gives him a shaky smile that falls instantly. Her eyes glaze over with the green glow they have all come to associate with the Traveler guiding her. 

As if lead on strings, she pushes past him towards the self. Her fingers, engulfed by green light, dancing almost playfully over the tapes until settling on one labeled Bren. 

Jester blinks the light out of her eyes. “Oh no.” She says, clutching the tape in her hands. The small plastic rectangle a bomb about to go off. “Please no.”

Neither of them want to see but Jester ejects the Astrid tape and puts in Bren’s. 

Molly has one hand wrapped around hers, stopping her from pressing play before he even knows he wants to. 

“Maybe we shouldn’t. We don’t need to see.” He says and feels the warm embrace of Cree. Her voice calling him Lucien and the presence of Nonagon in the back of his mind. 

“If I don’t, I will imagine worse.” Jester says with all the wisdom she likes to hide. Her eyes are bright with tears but set hard with resolve. Molly knows she is right even if he’d rather live in blissful ignorance. He is an expert liar only to himself. Steel in her spine, Jester starts the recording. 

“-OUT! TAKE THEM OUT! PLEASE!” A young voice screams, distorted, horrifying, and oh so much younger than they remembered. 

Molly would have recognised that voice anywhere. By the way Jester throws her hands over her mouth to keep in a sob, he could tell that she did too. 

Ikithon in the recording waves his hand, a shimmer in the air almost invisible on the old tape and suddenly the screams cut out. It didn’t stop the thrashing of the young boy on the gurney, strapped in the same way Astrid had been. His arms are bleeding and swollen from all the cuts, and inside those cuts are the pulsing glow of the crystal shards. 

It takes a few minutes for Ikithon to look down on the boy crying in pain, begging in silence. 

“The augmentation appear to have several side effects, as we had predicted. The inherent magic of the components did boost the ability by a considerable margin. However, it appears that the energy of the test subject encourages crystal growth inside the body. While this resulted in an exponential increase in available energy and power, the subject seem unable or unwilling to harness it. The process is evidently quite painful.” Ikithon presses his thumb onto one of the crystal growths and watches as the boy jerks away violently, trying to escape from his grasp. “I will continue to observe the development for a few more days to see if the subjects stabilize. My suggestion for the future would be to find more resilient subjects that are more likely to be able to handle the strain.” Ikithon says and takes the boy’s chin in his hands to force him to look at him. With a snap of his other hand, the silence spell dissipates and the painful sobbing of the boy returns. It echoes in the operation room, despite the boy’s best attempt to muffle the noise. 

“I’m very disappointed in how these tests have gone, Bren.” 

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Es tut mir leid. Bitte. Bitte, nehmt sie raus.”

“I told you to speak common to me. If you have nothing worthwhile to say, don’t waste my time.” 

“I’m sorry, Master, please. Please take them out. They hurt. Please.” The boy stumbles over the words, the accent thicker than they ever heard it. 

Ikithon considers the boy. “We’ll see how it develops. This is supposed to make you stronger, Bren. So you can be useful to your country. Do you understand?” 

“Yes, Master but plea-” 

Another wave of hand, a shimmer and the voice cut off. 

Molly ejected the tape. 

“Oh gods, Caleb.” Jesters cheeks are wet with tears

Oh gods, indeed. “He did say Ikithon had experimented on them.” Molly says, his own voice sounding foreign to his ears. It’s too calm, too restrained. His demonic blood is boiling with the urge to rip flesh apart but he stands still. 

He feels the thin scars on Caleb’s arms under his fingertips in a phantom memory. Wondering, always curious but never asking. Molly could imagine his own stories. They had always been dreadful. Caleb invited tragedy. Something like this had floated in Molly mind sometimes, far down the list of possibilities. Reality was usually more mundane. Knowing for sure was not a comfort. 

His eyes look at the writing on the tape. “How old was he?” He wonders aloud and Jester glances at the date, fresh tears welling up.

“He must have been so young Molly. Sixteen or seventeen, eighteen at most.” She says miserably. 

He closes his eyes, indulges in the fantasy of smashing everything in here to bits, setting fire to the building, razing everything to the ground. 

“Open your bag.” He says instead and Jester is already a step ahead of him. The pink magic haversack glides of her back and she stuffs Astrid’s tape in there, Bren’s following right after. Molly grabs two for whoever Eoduwulf was, two each for Lisa and Gustav. They disappear into the dark void of the pocket dimension. 

Jester closes her eyes when she closes the bag, lips moving in a silent prayer to the Traveler. 

“That’s all there is here.” She says finally. “Nothing else of interest.” 

Molly nods. He’s happy to take the word of an otherworldly being over searching through this filth any longer. He would do it, but he’s relieved not to. His skin is already crawling, he doesn’t want to find out what other horrors lie beneath layers of dust. Hoping to be forgotten. 

“Let’s get the fuck out of here.” He doesn’t need to tell Jester twice. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


“Astrid and Eodwulf will be delighted to see you back in our ranks. They have missed you.” Ikithon says with disdain. How human of his disciples, to experience emotion. What a disappointment, for his proteges to indulge in such a thing. 

Bren has missed them too. When he saw - cut the hair on her sides with the electric razor he bought for shaving his face, brown hair cluttering the blades, he thought of Astrid’s long hair falling in their shared bathroom. She had been sick of it getting in her face when studying, she had said. When - puffed his chest, cheeks hot as they teased him about his size, he remembered Eodwulf engulfing him in a bone crushing hug, his feet lifting off the ground. 

He wants to tell Ikithon he missed them too. Ikithon wouldn’t ever tell them of the sentiment and he knows they wouldn’t need the reassurance from him or otherwise. It’s an impulse to voice his thoughts that seems unfamiliar to him. How quaint. He thought he had unlearned such sentimentalities. 

Not that it matters. The geas strangles his throat before he can even open his mouth. 

“You have cost me a lot of time and effort, Bren. I expect you to be worth it.” Ikithon says. 

Bren expects the same of himself. A tool is only good when it works. There is no need for useless things. 

\- braids flowers in his hair, her fingers tiny but strong. To protect him, - says. Bren has no memory of a protective spell requiring flowers as components. 

* * *

  
  


It takes two days for Beau to get results. She is wound tight like a wire about to snap. Fjord’s presence at her side is a comfort even if he keeps quiet. These are her people, this is her responsibility so she takes the lead, she is the one that talks. 

The evidence Nott, Jester and Molly found in a library is enough. It is too much. They made Beau watch it before showing it to her superiors and it’s a good thing because she broke the TV in their hotel room. Yasha had left right after Beau’s fist had pulled free from the smashed plastic and they haven’t seen her since. She isn’t worried, she doesn’t have the capacity to be worried about Yasha right now. 

Dairon keeps glancing at her like they want to tell her something. Beau doesn’t think she could stand to hear the pride she can see in Dairon’s eyes being voiced right now. Couldn’t accept it. She had failed. Someone had gotten taken again and she hadn’t been able to stop it. Beau and Caleb had promised each other after the Iron Shepherds, never again. She hadn’t kept it. 

Three days now. It’s too long. Too long with what they know. 

The Monastery is a bustle of people organizing their attack. They already think they know where Ikithon is, Jester’s magic had helped them confirm it. Now they are preparing. 

Beau has nothing to prepare. She wrapped her arms twice already. The first time had been tight enough to make her fingernails turn blue. Fjord clasps a hand on her shoulder. He’s been closed off and short with them all. This is the side of things he hasn’t experienced yet. Beau is the one teaching him this time. They can’t afford to lose anyone else. 

She feels Molly’s arms wrap around from behind her, his sharp chin on her shoulder. Her first instinct is to ram her elbow in his rips and make him gasp. She does, but she holds back. Molly gasps anyway, mostly for show. 

“Good work.” He tells her and kisses her cheek because he knows it irritates her. She shrugs him off and he lets go but his presence lingers. 

Behind them are the heavy steps of Yasha. She looks a little sheepish but mostly filled with righteous fury when Beau throws a look over her shoulder at her. 

“Let’s get him back.” Yasha says and Beau looks back at the bustle around them. People that raised her, that she had grown up with, an oiled machine preparing for war. Sees Jester’s blue hair among the robes of cobalt and streaks of green running between feet, too fast to make out Nott’s shape. The rest of her family at her back. 

“Let’s.” Beau says and cracks her knuckles. 

* * *

Molly sheds his coat as soon as the flames start to clear. It’s not as fire resistant as him. He throws it into the general direction of the others before he runs forward. Past the curtain of flames Caleb is standing frozen, the twisted epicenter of this storm. The fire licks at the crystals in his arms, what’s left of them, lingering seconds before they blow out like fireflies. Ikithon’s body is charred beyond recognition, a statue of cinders preserved in time. One hand, spindly thin and ghostly is still reaching out. Now at least, he can’t touch Caleb ever again.

It’s hard to tell if Caleb is shocked by the sight of it or if the complicated web of mind altering spells Ikithon spent days weaving him into finally broke his mind for good. It was a display unlike anything Molly has ever seen before. Caleb just stands there staring, his eyes blank and empty and all too familiar.

Molly has his arms around Caleb’s middle, moments before his legs give out. His skin is smoldering to touch and shirt starts to smoke where its pressed against Caleb’s naked back, but he knows his skin will remain untouched underneath. With Caleb’s weight against him Molly takes the first unburdened breath in days. 

“It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s over.” He says and he isn’t sure if it’s for Caleb’s benefit or for his own. All the reaction he gets out of the other man is the subtle shivers starting to wreck him. He tucks Caleb’s face into the crook of his neck and starts rocking back and forth. He hopes it brings them both some comfort. 

The fire dies down, and Jester and Nott are at their side immediately. Yasha, Beau and Fjord take a more measured pace, keeping watch on their surroundings. The sound of the fight is distant and Beau is probably concerned for her people but right now everything but them seems trivial. 

“Careful- he’s still hot.” He warns and it speaks to the severity of the situation when Jester doesn’t take the bait to make a joke. 

Nott hovers, her hands just shy of touching Caleb as Jester takes his arms. “Oh, Caleb.” Her magic is the only thing to keep her skin from blistering.

Most of the crystals have cracked during the fight, exploding into tiny shards embedding themselves in Caleb’s skin, ripping apart the complicated symbols underneath the soot covering them. Blood is slowly tracking paths through, turning the red into black ink. 

He presses a kiss to Caleb’s forehead. Breathing in the smell of sweat. 

Jester’s light is dim as she heals up the worst of the damage. Spent still from when she had tried to fix Caleb’s head - minutes, hours ago? Molly can’t remember how long they have been here, storming the figurative castle with the Cobalt Soul at their back. Jester gasps and her eyes fill with tears when the green glow leaves her. “I can’t- we have to get him to a doctor.” 

“I’m not sure a doctor would know what to do with this.” Nott says, she hovers over a crystal but flinches away before she can touch. “Another cleric maybe?” 

“I know someone. They aren’t far.” Molly says and hopes Caduceus won’t mind an impromptu visit. He looks to the sky but the night is dark and the fight must have scared all the birds away, ravens or otherwise. 

“You guys get him out of here, we’ll deal with... this.” Beau tells them and she kicks Ikithon’s corpse. It breaks apart with a sickening sound. 

Yasha comes forward to take Caleb from her but Molly is already getting to his feet. He isn’t as strong as her but this weight he will carry. He has to. 

* * *

Burning. 

He is burning. 

His parents are still inside screaming but this time the house is inside him.

Smoke in his lungs and liquid fire dripping from his fingertips like sweat. 

Fingers digging in his head like ice. 

Astrid is cutting back his scalp as Eodwuld holds his throat. 

One scarred hand clasping in his own. 

Embers. 

Ashes. 

Bren. 

“_ Caleb _.” 

Caleb.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to my beta EchoedMusic!
> 
> The title translates to "Reuinion with the Elf King"   
"Der Erlkönig" is a german poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It's about a boy and his father riding through the dark woods at night. The Elf King tries to get the son to come with him, even threatening violence. The son keeps trying to tell his father about the danger, who dismisses his worries but at the end of the poem the father finds his son dead in his arms.   
Listen to the Franz Schubert song of this poem! It's great. 
> 
> It always makes me think of Caleb and Ikithon's relationship.


End file.
